the Opportune
It is the opportune moment for Kairos to have, in its first installation of interviews, this interview with Phillip Sipiora. Sipiora and Baumlin's edited collection Rhetoric and Kairos, published this year (SUNY UP, 2002), presents new and contemporary scholarship on the concept of kairos in rhetoric and across different fields. This same year, our journal Kairos collaborated with other electronic journals in rhetoric and composition studies, weaving together a multi-journal issue, Kairos 7.x, to investigate timely questions on the current flux of publication in-between print and electronic mediums. Both publications call for reflection on how the concept of kairos can be, and constantly is, reinvigorated for contemporary occasions. The time is ripe, once again, for Kairos as a journal to distinguish itself from various print and electronic publications by exploring and exemplifying its titular concept.

In this interview, Sipiora reminds us of previous scholarship on the rhetorical concept of kairos and urges the interweaving of various forms of kairos with our everyday teaching, writing and scholarship. In some ways, Sipiora's interview reflects the ideas of various contributors in 7.x who mention the ways that kairos has been appropriate within their professional lives.[1] In further ways, Sipiora suggests advantageous openings for the writers and readers of Kairos to utilize the important intersections between the historical uses of the term and the journal's subject matter.

In a modest attempt to illuminate the slippery concept of kairos, the topic headings for this interview guide us in grasping at some of its many manifestations so that we as readers, teachers and scholars might remember to align kairos with our purposes.

Phillip Sipiora is Professor and Interim Chair of the Department of English at the University of South Florida. Dr. Sipiora is a published author on topics of rhetoric, kairos, and ethics. He is co-editor of Kairos and Rhetoric: Essays in History, Theory, Praxis (SUNY UP, 2002) and Ethical Issues in College Writing (Peter Lang, 1999); translator of Augusto Rostagni's "A New Chapter in the History of Rhetoric and Sophistry" (in Kairos and Rhetoric); and he is author of "Kairos in the Discourse of Isocrates" (in Realms of Rhetoric: Phonic, Graphic, Electronic, 1991), "Introduction: The Ancient Concept of Kairos" and "Kairos: The Rhetoric of Time and Timing in the New Testament" (in Kairos and Rhetoric, 2002), "James L. Kinneavy and the Ethical Imperative" (Journal of Advanced Composition, 1999), and "Ethical Argumentation in Darwin's Origin of Species" (in Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Critical Theory, 1994).

KH:
I thought that we could converse over email about your work on kairos and your thoughts about this journal's use of and intersection with that concept. Would you tell us about your background as a scholar writing about kairos? Perhaps you could let us know what sparked your interest in kairos as a rhetorical concept and about the scholarly research you have done on the concept.

PS:
I began working on kairos in the early 1980s, when I was first introduced to the concept by James Kinneavy, my major professor at the University of Texas. Kinneavy had discovered a substantial monograph on kairos published in 1922 by Augusto Rostagni but it was never translated into English, and Kinneavy asked me to translate it in order that he might quote from Rostagni for an article Kinneavy was working on. Rostagni brilliantly traces kairos and its early development in Greek thought prior to Plato and Aristotle, especially in the work of Pythagoras. I translated the essay for Kinneavy and, in the process, became very interested in the richness and multiplicity of meanings of kairos. For the ancient Greeks, kairos was a master concept, transcending disciplines, and was no less significant than logos (the two concepts are sometimes analyzed in tandem, as is the case of Paul Tillich's theological work). Kairos is a strategic concept in ancient philosophy, literature, and aesthetic theory, as well as rhetoric. The term (and concept) is much more than a rhetorical issue, although its significance for rhetoric cannot be overemphasized, in my view.

PS:
I have given a number of papers on kairos at professional conferences and in the late 1980s I began soliciting essays for the collection Rhetoric and Kairos. My co-editor, James S. Baumlin, was equally intrigued by this ancient concept and he was instrumental in bringing in a number of new essays for the SUNY volume, which he negotiated. We have another book, Kairos in Translation, under contract with Mellen Press. This collection will contain complete translations of germinal essays written on kairos in the twentieth century.


[1] see the separate perspectives of Salvo and Doherty on the production of Kairos the journal as both shaping and being shaped by the people involved in its production; see also Taylor's remarks on colleagues's recognition of kairic timing for their professional work.

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